Lucas L. Schulte analyzes “The Book of Isaiah in the Persian Period.” This was a crucial time in the book’s overall development. He shows how Persian emperors were able to enlist scribal elites in various subject nations and win their support. The well-known Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon may be the most prominent example, but Isa 40–66 also reflects its own interpretation of this international Persian Royal Propaganda Model. This chapter also shows how the later parts of the book of Isaiah interacted with religious and sociopolitical issues in the postexilic Persian province, comparing and contrasting it with the viewpoints of Ezra and Nehemiah in particular.

This chapter discusses the history of the Nile Delta during the periods of Persian and Macedonian rule, as demarcated by the journey of Herodotus in the middle of the fifth century BCE and Strabo’s stay in the wake of the prefect Cornelius Gallus. The four centuries separating the two journeys were marked by a major event: the foundation and emergence of Alexandria. While Herodotus provides the description of a polycentric Delta, composed of a dozen large cities, Strabo’s description is dominated by the presence of Alexandria. Yet, however momentous, the Alexandrian history does not summarise that of the whole Delta. The development of the Eastern Delta is marked both by increased militarisation and by the strengthening of trade and economic relations between Egypt, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. Located far from the eastern military rampart but also away from the western capitals, the role of the Memphis area was gradually reduced by the development of east–west transversal routes converging on the Canopic branch, where the political nucleus of Egypt was located. Finally, the Western Delta was a political centre long before Alexandria, with ongoing connections to the history of the Libyan desert.

This chapter is a synchronic snapshot of the way that poems, speeches, sociability, and bureaucracy coalesced at Stalinist literary occasions. Here, literary representatives made their claims to representative authority and, on that basis, lent legitimacy to the multinational state and the international revolutionary project. The chapter follows the Iranian émigré poet Abu al-Qasim Lahuti through his performances at three multinational and international events over the course of 1934–1935: the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow; the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris; and Stalin’s Kremlin meeting with Tajik and Turkmen collective farmers at which the multinational “friendship of peoples” was declared. Lahuti’s exchanges at these events with writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and André Gide contributed to the articulation of the role of the Eastern literary representative and the ceremonial of authoritarian mass politics in the Soviet Union and beyond. As Persianate forms left their traditional contexts and entered this Russocentric world literature system, their utility as rhetorical tools for negotiating patron–poet power relations collapsed, and they came to be read in translation as simple flattery. This chapter thus presents Soviet multinational socialist realism as an illustrative early instantiation of institutionalized world literature.

This chapter considers civic newspaper poetry in Persian and Azerbaijani Turkic as a site for the establishment of a new radical politics and poetics of representation during and after the entangled Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman revolutions of 1905–1911. In the historiography of Persian and Central Asian literature, these revolutions are generally considered to be catalysts for a literary modernity engaged with European models and genres. This chapter shows how the poetics of new modes of political representation came to be articulated in classical and folk verse forms (qasida, ghazal, lullaby) that had preexisting repertories of tools for establishing, negotiating, and contesting claims to representational legitimacy. Surveying the main types of periodicals (newspaper, literary journal, satirical journal), the chapter shows how poets developed different styles for different venues, focusing on ‘Ali-akbar Sabir, lead poet of the Azerbaijani satirical journal Mulla Nasreddin. The chapter next considers how poets reworked court panegyric to glorify the parliaments and revolutionary parties that contested royal sovereignty, focusing on the newspaper verse of the Iranian poets Abu al-Qasim Lahuti and Adib al-Mamalik. Lastly, the chapter follows the transfer of the allegorical patriotic lullaby from Azerbaijan to Iran, focusing on the role of the Iranian publisher Nasim-i Shumal.

This chapter argues that from late Stalinism to the Khrushchev Thaw (1941–1964), Eastern poets and orientalist translators inflected multinational and international translation with a distinctively Persianate ethics of love and hospitality. The chapter develops an account of a mid-century internationalist sentimentality grounded in translation, which prefigures subsequent attempts in feminist theory to reconfigure the patriarchal idea of translation as possessive love into a more receptive model of translation. The opening section challenges the established Soviet and Russian studies narrative in which multinational literature is said to have been invented in Russian translation, showing Eastern poets’ active involvement in programming their own reception. A series of case studies follow. One section considers the collaborations of Uzbek and Russian poets on bilingual poems of hospitality for the Jewish refugees flooding Tashkent during the Second World War. Another shows how the embedded sonnets of Romeo and Juliet were brought into the ghazal mode in Tajik translation. Another shows how the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s theater adaptation of the classical romance Farhad and Shirin sparked Thaw literature debates in Russian and Turkic translations. Poets discussed include Ghafur Ghulam, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Simonov, and Zhala Isfahani.

The introduction sketches the history of literary internationalism in the communist East. Throughout much of Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East, modern socialist and anticolonial revolutionary movements have drawn on a shared non-European political, intellectual, and artistic culture whose canonical forms and models were born in Persian. For this reason, throughout the twentieth century, the fate of Persianate culture was deeply intertwined with the fate of communist internationalism in Eurasia. This introduction establishes the basis for the book’s basic conceptual categories: Persianate, Eastern, transnational, multinational, international, and world poetics. The Persianate functions in this book as a repertory of cultural forms rather than a civilizational unity. The distinction between transnational and international is also crucial to the book that narrates the process by which a transnational cosmopolitanism of ordinary people was replaced by an international friendship between nations performed by an elite corps of literary representatives and the practical commons of Persianate forms turned into the reified political unity of the revolutionary East. For this process, the introduction provides a periodization based on generations of Eastern internationalist writers, each illustrated by several short biographical examples.

A prosopography of the soldiers of the cohort, making use of the new readings I have taken from the manuscripts. Next to each name, details of its conservation (complete or partial), rank and/or duty, and location (papyrus, line, date) are given.

This chapter addresses the shift from multilingualism to monolingualism associated with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. It begins with a general overview of the linguistic conditions in the Ottoman lands, briefly surveying the historical dimensions of linguistic interactions reflecting the ebb and flow of Ottoman expansion and contraction, including the Westward movement of Turkic speakers into the central Islamicate lands and Anatolia from the eleventh century, the expansion of Ottoman rule into the Balkans from the fourteenth century, and the influx of Muslim refugees into the shrinking borders of the Empire as a result of military defeats and ethnic cleansing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter then focuses on three main factors affecting linguistic interactions in the Ottoman lands: (a) the inherently multilingual nature of Ottoman Turkish as an amalgam of three languages, namely, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian; (b) the lived linguistic experience in the Empire, including the lack of a clear correlation between ethnicity, religion, and mother tongue, e.g., large numbers of Armenians, Turks, and Greeks, whose first language was not, respectively, Armenian, Turkish, or Greek, and; (c) the ways in which the advent of nationalism and Western influence affected the linguistic scene in such a diverse and demographically mixed Empire. The chapter ends by considering post-Ottoman language policies and the monolingual orientation of the modern nation-state. The tensions between the two are often revealed when signs of the multilingual past emerge to disturb the monolingual assumptions of the modern, read “national,” era.

This chapter demonstrates how proto-Sunni traditionalists deployed forms of ethno-racial reasoning in constructing discourses of heresy and orthodoxy. It explores five interrelated themes embedded within such discourses: the confessional ambiguity of Abu Hanifa’s ancestors; conflicting accounts of Abu Hanifa’s genealogy; attempts to establish Abu Hanifa’s servile social status; a wider semantic field of foreignness to label Abu Hanifa; and criticisms of his views on Persian as a liturgical language. In this way, the relationship between orthodoxy, heresy, and society comes into sharp relief.

Luxurious dress and jewelry were important in public self-representation in Perso-Anatolian and Etruscan cultures. What distinguishes jewelry use in these societies is that jewelry was equally significant for elite males as it was for females. In fact, most of the visual evidence for jewelry in the East comes from ornaments worn by soldiers, court officials, and kings. Persian, Anatolian, and Lydian women are rarely represented in the surviving art, making it unusually difficult to reconstruct the jewelry styles and types they favored. Etruscan men, too, showed themselves with rings, bracelets and armbands, necklaces, and earrings. This chapter examines the male adoption of jewelry and explores the meanings of personal ornaments in both cultures.

Similarities in the imagery of Etruscan and Western Anatolian dress fashions, such as pointed shoes and Ionic chitons, indicate an obvious connection between the clothing systems of the two cultures. Indeed, Larissa Bonfante (2003) in her groundbreaking book Etruscan Dress classifies an “Ionian Phase” (550–475 BCE) in the development of the Etruscan clothing system. This chapter investigates the adaptation of Ionian dress items into the Etruscan dress repertoire through a comparative iconographic study of dress fashions in western Anatolia and Etruscan funerary art of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. After an overview of prevailing dress fashions in both cultures, it explores the specific case of shoes with upturned toes (Etruscan/Hittite shoes, as they are commonly known) to show the changing meanings and cultural connections the adopted dress items conveyed.

This first chapter traces the characteristics and development of the mirror literatures in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. It discusses the range of forms and styles, and the varied functions, of these advisory texts, and their generic designations in the original languages. The chapter identifies and discusses four major periods: the Early or Formative Period (eighth and ninth centuries); the Early Middle Period (tenth to twelfth centuries); the Later Middle Period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries); the Early Modern Period. At several points, the discussion indicates parallels and affinities among the mirror literatures produced in contemporaneous Muslim and Christian settings. The chapter ends with a discussion of the appearance, presentation and reception of mirrors for princes.

In this final chapter, I analyze Furūgh Farrukhzād’s innovative development of Nīmā’s earlier prosodic experiments and link Farrukhzād’s late modernist poetic project with Western modernist poetry. My purpose in avoiding lengthy comparisons with Western poetry up to this point in the book is to provincialize European poetic modernism and consider instead the significant links in poetic forms, themes, and politics that were more important for the elaboration of modernism in the Arab and Iranian contexts. However, I also readily admit that Western poetic influence plays a significant role in the Arab and Iranian modernists’ approaches to poetry. I thus take the opportunity in this last chapter to address Farrukhzād’s work not only in the context of local poetic connections, but also in light of the bonds she forged with Western modernist poetry. In so doing, I argue that Farrukhzād’s poetic persona is best understood as a flâneuse, the female Iranian counterpart to Charles Baudelaire’s Parisian poetic persona. I furthermore undertake a lengthy analysis of the close associations between Farrukhzād’s late poetry and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” from 1925.